13 September 2015

Interview: SOUNZ Contemporary Award 2015

The SOUNZ Contemporary Award is New Zealand's premier
composition prize, the classical equivalent of the Silver Scrolls. Each year
three finalists are chosen from a pool of entries. The winner will be announced
at the Silver Scrolls awards night on Thursday 17 September at Vector Arena in
Auckland. This year the SOUNZ Contemporary finalists are Ross Harris (for his
Piano Quintet), Chris Watson (sing songs self) and Reuben Jelleyman (Expanse).
Listener blog editor Alex Taylor caught up with the three finalists ahead of
the awards ceremony.

Alex Taylor: How do you feel about being a finalist? How do
you feel about the possibility of being "covered" at the Silver
Scrolls on Thursday?

Ross Harris: It's great to be part of the finals and being
covered at the Silver Scrolls can be completely hilarious.

Alex: What's your experience of that Ross - who's
covered you in the past?

Ross: Hamish McKeich and Nathan Haines did the second symphony in a jazz
style.

Alex: That must have been quite something!

Ross: Yeah it was really good actually.

Chris: It's a great honour, of course, to be a finalist.
It feels like a form of validation that I didn't know I needed but am, as it
turns out, happy to receive! Not sure how to feel about potentially being
covered. I guess it would be a bit of a laugh.

Alex: I mean, for a lot of the audience - the cover
will be the one and only time they hear your piece!

Chris: Hopefully everyone there on the night realises
the looseness of the interpretation of the cover.

Alex: Yes absolutely. I know there's going to be drum n
bass at some point…

Chris: And the preliminary video should feature quite a
bit of the actual recording.

Reuben: I’m quite
surprised, really [to be chosen as a finalist]. I think as a young composer
considering their early 'career' you never think to count on such recognition
at an early stage. I'm keen on the ceremony style - I think all the musical
activities during the evening are quite a bit of fun.

Ross: Don't forget
earplugs.

Alex: Very
good advice.

Reuben: Ross - this is essential! I never go anywhere
without them in fact.

Alex: Any
picks for the other categories? The silver scroll is a doozy this year.

Reuben: Unknown Mortal Orchestra is my pick [for the song
Multi-Love]

Chris: I'm ashamed to say I've not swotted up on the
other categories. My NZ music knowledge is limited… But I will make the effort ahead
of the night.

Ross: I haven't thought about that; I'm actually more
interested in the 1981 competition [The Lost Silver Scroll, to be awarded to
the best song of 1981]

Alex: Yes -
that's a doozy too! Counting the Beat has been a fav of mine...

Chris: Like Ross, the 1981 bit has more resonance for
me.

Reuben: I'm backing Blam Blam Blam [There is No
Depression in New Zealand] for that one, but I really have not much to do with
1981...

Chris: Before your time, Reuben?

Reuben: Yes, a few years.

Reuben: x4

Ross: Yeah that's my choice too.

Alex: Topical.

Ross: All too topical.

---

Alex: Listening to your piece Ross, the piano is
initially a kind of percussive trigger for events - what's the trigger, the
impetus for each of you to actually compose music?

Reuben: Sound Visions.

Chris: I'm not sure. Any rational view would disincline
me from even starting a piece. So much effort, such delayed gratification!

Alex: So it's not a rational thing, then?

Chris: I suppose not. It's an inner urge amplified by an
almost obligation to make something because I have certain skills... of course,
there's great enjoyment along the way too.

Alex: Chris - that's a good way to put it - a lot of
people mention the inner urge, the compulsion, and leave out the obligation
part. Stravinsky may have been the vessel through which the rite passed, but he
still had to write to commission....

Chris: This particular
piece happened because I had time and funding to do something big(gish) - the
Mozart Fellowship. Also, the remnants of the romantic piano concerto fan in me
needed and found an outlet.

Reuben: Regarding earlier: I find sound hallucinations
map themselves to opportunities before me. For me I've never really written
unless there is the concert opportunity ahead of me, given to me. (rather not
'given' to me but 'offered' through competition). From then on it’s about
finding the easiest way to write it down - the 'eigenvector'; in this respect
Chris's comment is pertinent: it takes much effort, so must be worth doing.

Ross: Well the commission by Austrian Peter Diessl was
a starting point and then the ensemble of string quartet plus piano i.e.
sustained sounds versus percussion was inspiring. The piece evolves out of that
sound world… making the contrasting timbres belong. And the desire to make a
piece evolve over a reasonable timespan!

Alex: you've talked about
that a lot Ross - "a reasonable time span" - the idea of a miniature
seems almost anathema to your aesthetic - why do you write long pieces? surely
any span of time can be "reasonable" or musically conducive?

Ross: That's a good question. To be honest the
challenge of longer pieces has dominated my work recently and I think I would
have a lot of trouble with miniatures at the moment.

Chris: The obligation thing...sometimes I feel like I'm
more into film or fine art than music and that I'd like to make a contribution
in one of those areas. But I've not the skills for that, so I'm kind of stuck
in music! - that's no bad thing, but is a source of a degree of frustration.

Alex: Yes, I feel a bit like that with poetry.

Chris: I wouldn't really know, but you seem to me to be
a very fine poet, Alex.

Alex: Ha! Thank you, Chris. I guess I feel I don't
really have the craft that I feel I do in music. But it's interesting how one
sort of falls into being a composer…

Ross: I didn't have anything else to fall into.

Chris: Maybe not, Ross, but your breadth of exploration
within music is massively wide.

Alex: Hear, hear!

Reuben: Yes, I agree!

Ross: Struggling on!

Reuben: I've been desiring to write longer form for a while
now, but I'm hardly given the opportunity - everything I write for is
<5mins, say. I took the opportunity over summer to work on a ~13min
orchestral piece, but still I marvel at what many composers can do with 20mins,
and hope to work with these proportions myself (ASAP).

Chris: 20 minutes is scary long in my opinion.

Reuben: I've always wondered though what it would be like
to sit through > 20mins of your own music... Ross?

Ross: It is a very long time for a single movement. Not
all that many western art music pieces go that far -or at least not without a
narrative- words etc. At least with a longish piece you might get a chance to
relax and actually hear it unfolding.

Alex: Perhaps your mode of listening changes according
to how long you think you are going to have to sit there for...

Ross: Definitely. In electroacoustic concerts they
often tell you how long the pieces are.

Reuben: The foresight listening that Lutosławski worked
so hard to disrupt.

Alex: I find listening in an engaged way really
exhausting - so longer pieces are by necessity more meditative for me...

Chris: I'm only really capable of listening in the
moment so actually struggle with longer works and only get the most out of them
after repeated visits. My short attention span is probably evident in my own
music.

Alex: That gives it an appealing mercurial quality I
think chris...

Chris: ...often at the expense of convincing
architecture.

Alex: Quicksilver doesn't need architecture!

Ross: I agree with Alex about the mercurial quality of
your music Chris. What's foresight listening?

Reuben: Just a pseudo-definition of what Alex was talking
about, where the audience start predicting how long a section will continue
for.

Ross: What's wrong with audiences feeling enough about
a piece to start predicting duration? Not consciously of course but in an
anticipatory way.

Reuben: I think what Bryn Harrison does with complex
aesthetics phasing over long periods unifies both these things.

Chris: Reuben, can you say more about "sound
hallucinations"?

Reuben: Chris, it's a case of half-perceiving,
half-hearing the sounds, and allowing them to form into events in your mind. I
suppose I work a lot with thought improvisations - trying to piece sounds
together like in free improvisation.

Ross: I'm with you Reuben on the half perceived,
half-heard. That interests me a lot at the moment, but transcendental? Who
knows?

Alex: Perhaps the sound hallucination thing ties into
this next question - Reuben - your piece strikes me as an intensely spiritual
work - it reaches a point of ecstasy or illumination just before the end - what
role does a spiritual or transcendental aspect play in your music? (perhaps you
have thoughts on this too, Chris and Ross)

Alex: It's like a creation ritual or something...

Reuben: I'm not sure, I certainly find a kind of excited
state of mind where whatever it is becomes too exciting to stop thinking about
it.

Chris: Does anyone have amazing ideas right on the cusp
of falling asleep? - I've often thought that capturing those thoughts is where
the real gold is. It alludes me, however!

Alex: Yes I try to write them down and often coming
back to decode them later is completely hopeless…

Reuben: I often lie in bed awaiting sleep and play the
piece from the beginning, matching the sounds together and constructing the
piece slowly, ordering ideas

Ross: Working at night
after waking from sleep seems fruitful for me sometimes.

Reuben: (Very)
early summer mornings are my favourite.

Ross: Bring on summer!

Alex: Do you see Expanse as a spiritual piece, though,
Reuben?

Reuben: I don't think so. I see it more as a kind of
system or environment of parts. It was necessarily short so I think it happens
all too quickly...

Chris: As an atheist, I struggle with the S-word, but I would
say that the word that came to mind upon hearing Reuben's piece was
'other-worldly'.

Reuben: I talk about the mysterious nature of the text,
and I think I prefer working with volatile semiotics...

---

Alex: All of you write music that is - more or less -
difficult to play. What is your relationship to virtuosity, and how do
performers fit in to that?

Ross: I usually try to make my music playable or at
least give the players a sense of satisfaction if they get close to getting it
'right'.

Chris: On a practical level I suppose I've long
abandoned any notion that community groups will play my music. I think
performative difficulty in my music grows out of the music I most admired as a
kid and teenager - Liszt, Albeniz etc. - I see complexist strands of composing
as a natural outgrowth of the show-off nature of that kind of romanticism,
rather than directly aligned with modernism.

Alex: That's interesting, because you're the opposite
of a show-off, Chris.

Chris: ...well, I have an ego too!

Ross: We are all individuals. "I'm not!"
(Monty Python)

Reuben: I find the textures or musical content I try to
create tends towards virtuosity, simply because my aesthetics demand a higher
level of complexity in the perceived sound - often it just means they have to
create a lot of sounds (but not randomly) in a short amount of time for it to
work.

Chris: That's it exactly, Reuben.

Reuben: I have also been interested in Ferneyhough's
approach of creating intensity in the sound through the rigorous process of performing,
and I think that this psychological/physiological aspect adds something. He
talks of a relationship between the score and the performer 'directed towards
performing the piece', rather than performing the piece comfortably, which is
less to the point of my interest with my own music.

Chris: Certainly for me, greater awareness of
physicality has been a motivation in the last 5 years or so. How a piece will
look, what degree of energy (or stasis) will be transmitted from players to
audience as an integral part of the musical experience. In the past the music
used to be very confined to the score for me, but now the theatrical is of
great importance. Yes, difficulty is the obvious way of creating that
extra-musical energy.

Ross: Then someone comes along who can play
Ferneyhough's music easily and one compositional parameter drops out.

Chris: Who is this freak, Ross?!

Ross: Um?

---

Alex: There's a kind of lineage here, three generations
of NZ composers, three NZSM composers, Ross you were Chris's teacher, etc - are
there musical links too do you think? (For example, I'm thinking of a restless,
energetic quality in both Chris's and Ross's musics, and a concern with pushing
and pulling musical time)

Chris: Lineage is a funny one. Often underestimated is
the degree to which a lineage can also exist when student rebels against
teacher! I think there's lineage between Ross and Lilburn, but not in terms of
imitation.

Alex: Absolutely!

Chris: I think I abjectly failed (continue to fail) to
apply Ross's exhaustive attempts to instil counterpoint and long range
teleology in me! - nonetheless, I'll always say he was and is my most important
teacher.

Ross: Ah yes - counterpoint.

---

Alex: Perhaps last question and thoughts - what would
you say - if anything - to a first-time listener of these pieces? What would
you hope they might take away from the experience?

Chris: I'm not sure I'd offer any advice. Just bring
your ears, as with any piece.

Ross: I'd like it if they found the piece beautiful,
intriguing, puzzling, exciting, 'need to hear it again' etc i.e. to have had
involvement in the piece.

Reuben: I would say: Listen to the sounds, and then
listen to how the sounds change and then know that the sounds were crafted
intentionally.